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ORATION 



DELIVERED BY 



HORATIO STEBBINS 



AT 



SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. 

JULY 4, 1876. 



1ST 



ORATION 



DELIVERED BY 



HORATIO STEBBINS 



AT 



SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. 

JULY 4, 1876. 



ORATION. 



Fellow - citizens of the Republic and of the Commonwealth of 
California : 

The great movements of mankind upon our globe, since it 
became the theatre of human life and human events, can never 
cease to be the subject of profoundest interest and loftiest con- 
templation. "There is a spirit in man," urging him on with 
the strong momentum of eternal law, to a destiny that ever 
allures him w r ith mystic w r onder and fascination. The earthly 
horizon of that destiny, ever retreating, invites him to the full 
and complete dominion of a world not yet subdued to intel- 
lectual and moral being. Generations, races and nations, 
inspired by impulse greater and mightier than themselves, move 
forward in grand consentaneous procession, and history unfurls 
her banners, the symbols of eternal purpose. 

One of the most sublime conceptions of which the mind is 
capable, is the contemplation of the periods of time during 
which the earth was being prepared to be a tit habitation of 
man. Compared with those periods, the lifetime of the human 
race is but a moment, or a thought flashed by electric touch 
from city to city. The introduction of man upon the earth is 
a modern event, modern as the morning of to - day ! The 
Egyptian civilization is but of yesterday, compared with the 
formation of the delta of the Mississippi; and the alluvial 
plains of the Euphrates, the first abodes of human society, 
were the work of cycles and asons of unrecorded time. These 
periods of time and preparation, in the contemplation of which 
the mind is oppressed with the vague sense of infinity, suggest, 
with striking intellectual and moral force, the importance of 
man's place in the scale of created things, and the rank he holds 
in the order of being: The last term in an ascending series, 
involved in all that goes before, crown and summit of creation, 



end and fulfilment of primal intent and purpose. Science 
unfolds the order of nature and reveals her method and law, 
but man, his fortunes, his deeds, his nature and bis destiny, are 
the noblest objects of thought and study. He is superior to 
nature, in that he recognizes the law of nature and the law of 
his own being. He discovers truth, good and evil, and is 
haunted by the thought that not death, but increasing life is 
his goal. Progressive reason achieves new conquests in every 
age, and can never rest until it is established ujoon the throne 
of the world, and the sublime affirmation is realized, " Thou 
has put all things under his feet." Man, society, nationality, 
government, give intellectual and moral import to a material 
universe, and the progress of history is the elevation of the 
moral character of mankind. 

The American Continent, earliest in geologic time of all the 
lands of the globe, was reserved to these later days to be the 
theatre of a new cycle of human culture, and a new display of 
the power of human society. 

The ancient oriental civilizations had flourished for thou- 
sands and tens of thousands of years, and sent forth those 
great migrations that founded the succession of Asiatic Empires, 
reared the fair forms of Grecian culture and the strength of 
Roman arms, made Europe the nursery of nations, and England 
the foster-mother of the modern world. Christianity, that 
religion which more than any other seems adapted to universal 
man, had kindled its holy signals on the hills of Judea nearly 
fifteen centuries before the Pilot of Genoa was born. Pome 
expired a thousand years before. During all these vast move- 
ments of mankind, and through these historic ages, when the 
soil of the world was being prepared to receive the seed of the 
Modern age, the American Continent lay concealed behind the 
horizon. The Ptolemaic system held the universe in the thral- 
dom of the senses, and religion, not yet allied to reason, 
enforced the thrall. The mind was enveloped in sense, and 
the sight of the eye, and the hearing of the ear, interpreted the 
world. The sun rose and set, and the earth was an extended 
plain. Imagination, strong angel of truth, had not looked 
with undazzled eye upon that inaccessible glory which the 
senses cannot touch. The outward manifestations of power 
filled the mind with vague wonder and fear, while reason had 

Joins Hopkin's Univ. Lib. 
Gift. 

JIM Vii -uok 



not yet discovered their law. It was the seed - time of history, 
the germinating period of human thought. 

It is now four hundred years since the European world 
began to feel those premonitory pains that go before the births 
of time. 

How the great ideas that now govern the world as the 
common thought of men first dawned upon the solitudes of 
genius, is beyond ihe power of man to tell. It is common to 
account for it in the intellectual law of suggestion or associa- 
tion. Accordingly, we are told that the apple falling from the 
tree in Newton's garden suggested the law of gravitation. But 
that is a mistake. The conception is in the mind; the apple 
does not convey it. It comes as the morning comes; it comes 
as the ripening of the grain; it comes as the flush of the vint- 
age, distilled in mystery and silence — but behold, a new heavens 
and a new earth, without noise or fear! The round world, as it 
lay in the serene imagination of Columbus, is one of the most 
striking illustrations of the power of an idea that history 
records. His heroism to obey the idea, and contrary to the 
opinions of his age, to follow it across the trackless deep, gives 
him an undisputed rank in the hierarchy of faith, and an 
immovable pedestal in the temple of earthly fame. Those 
masterly achievements of fidelity to a thought that character- 
ized the discovery of the New World were fit precursors of the 
fortunes of that New "World, destined as it was to be the field 
of new principles, in which the majority of mankind did not 
believe. The birth of navigation may be said to have been 
simultaneous with the discoveries of the fifteenth century. 
Among the conquests that man has made over the obstacles 
that the barriers of the world offer to his progress, navigation 
must take first rank. It spans the awful abysses of the sea, 
makes the communication of nations and races possible, supple- 
ments human wants by the exchange of the varied products of 
the earth and of human skill, and tends by its mighty processes 
of intercourse and communication to establish the equilibrium 
of the condition of mankind. Navigation was the beginning 
of that system of communication upon the earth which is the 
striking feature of our own day, and makes man at home in the 
world. 

A true theory of the solar and planetary worlds had vaguely 



emerged from chaos, in the devout reason of Copernicus; and 
the steady lights of the upper deep became the faithful guides 
of the trustful mariner, as he ploughed the dark longitudes from 
land to land. Copernicus did not announce and defend his 
theory, for fear of the Church, but his mind was the seed - plot 
of the idea of modern astronomy, and was one of the powerful 
causes that contributed to the intellectual conquest of the 
material world at that period. When lying upon his death -bed, 
and near his end, he united the expression of his devout faith 
and inspired intelligence in sentiments such as the sacred lyrist 
has embodied in his verse: 

Ye golden lamps of heaven! farewell! 

With all your feeble light, 
Farewell, thou ever changing moon — 

Pale empress of the night. 
And thou, refulgent orb of day! 

In brighter flames arrayed — 
My soul, which springs beyond thy sphere, 

No more demands thine aid. 

The two ideas, one of a round world as it lay in the brooding 
mind of Columbus; the other, of the solar system as it dawned 
in the intelligence of Copernicus, were the sovereigns of that 
time. 

But there was a nobler moment yet. It may be summed up 
in that general and somewhat vague expression, The Reforma- 
tion. In all the complex causes and relations which conspired 
in that event, the pith and quick of it was that it centered in 
man himself, and concerned his rights, his duties, his nature, 
and his destiny. The reformation was to man himself, what 
the round world and the solar system were to his conception of 
the material universe. It was the free activity of the individual 
mind in fealty to eternal, moral law. It brought order into the 
moral world, by making the individual a centre of power. It 
abolished authorities imposed from without, and instated the 
perceptions of reason and conscience within. It appealed from 
the few to the many; from the priest to the people; from the 
traditions of the elders to the mind and heart of man. It was net 
the revival of an old life, but the inspiration of a new; die transfer 
of civilization to a new centre of development. The old system 
had completed its orbit; but that orbit was not the complete 



cycle of human progress, ever widening its range and rising 
higher and higher. Men are the unconscious instruments of 
powers, principles and ideas which they do not fully compre- 
hend. They are the exponents of a period, but they do not 
originate its principles. It is a mistake to suppose that Martin 
Luther originated the Reformation, or that he was the father of 
it in any sense. The Reformation would have come if Luther 
had not been, and the moral grandeur of his figure in history 
is derived from his ability to discover the signs of the times, to 
read the horoscope of the period and confess the era of God. 
If you inquire for those mighty thoughts and sublime impulses, 
which are the seeds of human history, you ascend to those 
heights where genius o'ertops intelligence and insight becomes 
inspiration. The settlement of this continent by a strong and 
powerful race, who planted on these shores the seed of a new 
historic period, was the result of the Reformation. It was a 
movement that had its origin in the noblest moods of the human 
mind. Let no cheap animosities between Catholic and Protestant 
dim the clear, calm, historic vision; let no jealousies of the pro- 
vincialisms of human feeling intrude themselves into that august 
presence. 

Among the men who contributed by force of moral genius to 
reduce the chaotic elements of that period to order and form, 
thus supplying the practical working materials of progress, 
there is one whose name, and whose principles have been singu- 
larly associated with the origin and life of American institu- 
tions — I mean the lawyer, theologian, statesman of Geneva, 
John Calvin. It was he who gathered up the scattered moral 
powers of the Reformation, condensed them in definite, dog- 
matic, popular forms, and administered the affairs of religion in 
a republican spirit, thus making his horribile decretum faleor the 
seed-plot of Republican liberty. If his doctrine was cruel, it 
was the offspring of a cruel age. It was not Protestant or 
Catholic that was cruel; it was the condition of the human 
mind. That terrible doctrine, which now is like the nest of a 
former year from which the brood has flown, pervaded Christen- 
dom, and sent forth a mighty race that fought against tyranny 
everywhere, always sided with the people, gave victory to the 
plebeian Roundhead over the lordly Cavalier and sent forth a 
new Israel to take possession of this promised land of mankind 
and liberty. Calvanism was dispersed throughout Europe, and 



6 

probably influenced more minds than any other system of doc- 
trine or polity devised by man. Scotland was imbued with it, 
and through her philosophy it tinged the thought of the intel- 
lectual world. The Huguenot stock of South Carolina inherited 
it. William Penn was taught by a famous Calvanist. The early 
Dutch colonists of New York were of that lineage, and the 
settlers of Plymouth were of that athletic race. 

The system of free schools was devised by Calvin's brain and 
heart, and beyond the boundaries of sect, his hands, uncon- 
scious of its power, scattered the seeds of Republican liberty. 
As our American Idealist has wove it into verse that shall vibrate 
on all the chords of time: 

" He wrought in sad sincerity, 
Himself from God he could not free; 
He builded better than he knew; 
The conscious stones to beauty grew." 

In the hard and thorny husk of a cruel system were hid the 
seeds of a new life among the nations, and a new era for man- 
kind. 

Thus the life of American institutions bad its root in the Old 
World. The health of the scion attests the vigor of the native 
stock. "Whatever may have been the exploits of former races on 
this continent, whatever power or glory their civilization dis- 
played, they acted no part in the drama of the new era, and 
contributed nothing to the life of the new age. The traces of 
the mound - builders are a melancholy record of a race that we 
may gratefully believe fulfiled its destiny, and had no reason 
longer to be upon the earth. The native Indian — humble child 
of the forest, weak and passionate — dashes himself against the 
walls of the world, or dissolves like ice flowing into tropic seas. 
American civilization is of European and English origin. It is 
a new centre of human culture, from a seed matured in the 
highest and best experience of mankind. 

It must be confessed, humanly speaking, that the union of 
the American Colonies, first against foreign encroachment and 
then under a constitutional government, was a happy accident. 
But history distills wisdom and honor and power from human 
folly. The mad councils of George III lost him his colonies, 



but created a new nation. Had a better spirit prevailed, England 
might have been the mother of the Republic, or two England s 
might have ruled the world. The independence of the Ameri- 
can Colonies was brought about by those mixed causes, which, 
to the superficial observer, seem to be an inexplicable jumble of 
stupid blunder, blind folly and mad self-will. But to the 
philosophic historian, they are that apparent chaos of human 
events and human things over which the spirit of order ever 
broods, bringing forth the true, the beautiful and the «ood. 
Evil is never unmixed, and truth enveloped in error, falling 
upon the furrows of the world, expands, bursts its environ- 
ments and buds and blooms. 

Doubtless there is much vague declamation and would - be 
philosophic gravity in talking about the ' ' idea " of our govern- 
ment, or the "idea" of our institutions. There is probably no 
proper sense in which it can be said that Government has any 
idea or theory at all. Certainly the science of Government, if 
there is such a science, is not an exact science, and its princi- 
ples are continually applied to new facts and new conditions, in 
a new method. The unfolding of a principle is a growth, not 
a mechanic law. Thus, in all enterprise of man's affairs, in all 
administration of human things, the grand question is: Is it 
only a dead fact, or a living law? Admitting fully all the lim^ 
itations that practice sets to theory, still theory goes before 
practice, and includes practice. But the only theory, or idea, 
which a free Government can have, is the growth and develop- 
ment of the principle on which it rests. This is the difference 
between constitutional liberty and absolute monarchy. The 
one is the arbitrary application of a rule; the other is the 
unfolding of a principle. The one is a wooden fact, the other 
is an inspired truth. And thus in respect of ourselves and our 
historic origin, as a people and a nation, the question is, What 
was there at the bottom of this display of social order, that has 
so gone on where man nor angel never dreamed? The early 
settlers of the Continent had no conception of it. They brought 
with them the mature fruit of human experience, the latest that 
hung upon the branches of the tree of life. That fruit was the 
conviction, nay, more, transcending all reasoning process, the 
insight of inspired moral genius, that man's nature prefigures 
his liberty, and that he is and must be free to act of himself 
under moral law! That conviction, that insight, was new. The 



8 

men themselves did not know what it meant nor where it would 
lead. And why should they ! A man cannot tell even what his 
house will cost beforehand, and why should they understand 
the vision of truth that had never been applied to the guidance 
and government of men? The world had been governed by 
force, invading even the recesses of thought. Exclusive powers 
and privileges were held and exercised by the few, and the idea 
of man as man had no place on earth. Even the Almighty 
Maker and Ruler had his favorites, and no long - minded eterni- 
ties of benificent power brooded over the destinies of mankind. 
One of the most influential races that has ever lived on the face 
of the earth, inhabiting a little country on the borders of the 
Levant, that the modern traveler can "do" in the saddle in five 
or seven days, made even religion aristocratic, claimed that God 
was their God, and that they were His people to the exclusion 
of everybody else. I am not indifferent to the historic develop- 
ment of opinion, nor to the influence of Hebrew Theism upon 
the destiny of the human world; but it furnishes a striking 
illustration of the exclusiveness of human thought, associated as 
it commonly is, with the monopoly of God and contempt for 
man. But truth mingled with error tends to work itself clear. 
When we talk about the theory of free government, we mean, 
if we mean anything, that the bottom of it is the principle of 
liberty, as it is elementary and fundamental in human nature. 
And like other principles, if it is a principle, it is to be followed, 
and not to be led. If it is based upon the equality of men — 
that is, the equality of human nature — it is the affirmation that 
man everywhere is man — made of the same powers, passions 
and affections; that he has the same origin and the same 
destiny. The senses are the same in all; intelligence is the 
same in all; affection is the same in all; reason is the same 
in all; conscience is the same in all; faith is the same in 
all. These may be developed in different degrees, and ex- 
pressed in different terms, but they have their root in the same 
soil— of the same common nature. As I was riding, the other 
day in the suburbs of the city, among the sand hills, that form 
so striking and bold contrast with the cultivated and power- 
ful portions of the town, I met two children, who by ther habit 
and manner, showed that they belonged to the worthy, respecta- 
ble poor. Their frugal, tidy dress, their unstockinged feet, their 
modesty in presence of a stranger, flushed the very sand with 



loveliness; and in their little sun-burnt hands they held, loosely 
a few flowers, such as Nature gives in her bounty to relieve her 
desert places; and they were comparing the colors, as the sun- 
light poured down its golden rays and tilled the urns of beauty. 
I said to myself, Behold the identity of human nature! The 
same love of the beautiful that fascinates the soul of a Titian or 
a Tmtorretto! This is what we mean by the equality of men, 
the identity of human nature. This is the seed of human pro- 
gress, and the promise of man's destiny. Our llepublican De- 
mocracy is founded on that. It has always encountered suspis- 
cion and jealousy and evil foreboding from those who are not 
imbued with it; for if there are those who are too ignorant and 
wretched and benighted to be free, there are those, also, who 
are intelligent, yet who lack the moral genius to discern that 
they belong to the human race. 

TI13 history of the country for the hundred years on whose 
summit we now stand, has been little else than the develope- 
ment of this principle. On these mighty waters the nation sails, 
and the horizon forever recedes and earth and sky never meet. 
Our principles, so far from being exhausted, are only beginning 
to be unfolded, and we may justly expect that they are to play 
a leading part in the fortunes and destiny of mankind. If hu- 
man progress means anything, it means the enjoyment of the 
highest privileges and immunities of existence by all; it means a 
fair held for every man to pursue that line of thought and action 
which his own individuality directs, and which, to him, is the 
purpose of hi- being. All truth is expansive, and greater than 
men think when they first adopt it. The smallest seed of liber- 
ty when it is sown becomes a tree, and struggling human aspira- 
tions take refuge in its branches, or refresh themselves under its 
shadow for new resistance against ancient and venerable wrong. 
He who would confine the influence of free institutions to this 
theater of our display, would make a great mistake. The winds 
are its messengers, the lightnings do its biddings, the ocean is 
its mediator. The heart of man, source of restless imaginations 
and never satisfied longings, aspires to it from afar. 

It would be impossible, on an occasion like the present, to 
recount the events, the deeds, the persons of this century of repub- 
lican liberty. That is the office of the historian, the philosopher 
and the poet. It is enough for us to-day to take counsel of our 



10 

principles and reaffirm them as the profound conviction of our 
minds, attested by the experience of a century. It was announ- 
ced a hundred years ago by the founders of the government that 
all men are free and equal. We have read it to clay from the 
famous Declaration, and it will be read by those who shall come 
after us down the rolling tide of centuries to the latest recorded 
syllable of time. It is no contrivance of extemporaneous device; 
it is no rule for the exigency of the moment, cheap subterfuge 
of tyrants. It is in the eternal nature of truth, and things, and 
man and God. Neither is it any vagary or "glittering general- 
ity" in our minds but of clear, decided import and energ}'. It 
is as old as the heavens, and as new as to-day, and we claim for 
it that immortality that belongs to essential truth. 

We affirm and declare to-day, as the fathers did in 1776, that 
all men are free ! And we mean by it that fundamental fact of 
human nature by virtue of which man is man, endowed by heaven 
with the power to choose between good and evil, and to direct 
his course towards those ends that seem to him best ! We mean 
that the office of Government is to protect that freedom, and 
not to encroach upon it; to throw around it the environments of 
law, that under law it may be liberty indeed ! 

We affirm and declare to-day, as the fathers did in 177G, that 
all men are equal! Hear it, O Heaven! and give ear unto it O 
Earth! We mean by it the identity of that nature whose inspira- 
tions of reason and conscience are the same in tbeir eternal 
quality and divine essence! We mean that reason is reason, 
that conscience is conscience, that imagination is imagination, 
and that the progress of mankind is grounded in this common 
nature of man. On this we base our hope of human progress, 
and our faith in human destiny. Does experience give any 
ground for that hope and faith ? 

Human society on this continent for a hundred years, has been 
led forth under the power of the principles which we affirm and 
declare to-day. A continent has been subdued to culture. A 
degreee of external human comfort has been attained and enjoy- 
ed, that probably has not been surpassed in any portion of the 
earth, or in any period of history. Let us cheerfully accord 
whatever is clue to the cheapness and fertility of the soil, but let 
us also be just to human energies. The results of scientific 
research have been applied to the arts of life, and whatever par- 



11 

tains to man's conquest over the material world has been mado 
as complete here as i,i any other country. The area of the 
country has been extended by peace and by war until its borders 
are laved by both oceans through twenty degrees of latitude. 
The country to-day presents a theatre of world-grandeur for the 
display of free Constitutional Government. 

The affairs of the Government have been administered by 
those whom the people have chosen. Universal suffrage makes 
revolution unnecessary, by giving every man the right to appeal 
to the ballot as the final remedy of all public wrong. "We have 
never had under this plan a wicked or dissolute president, and if 
we ever had a weak one, the people have been steady enough to 
endure his weaknesss, conscious of their strength. We have 
never had a corrupt or mercenary Judge, and the judicial mind 
and ethic of the country, I speak firmly without boasting, com- 
pare favorably with the judicial mind and ethic of Christendom. 
The bad inheritance of slavery, bequeathed to us from the an- 
cient estate, we esteem no longer a portion of the nation's wealth 
and have absolved ourselves from its obligations by the blood of 
the sons of men. We have received from the nations of the 
earth and the islands of the sea, more than five millions of men, 
welcoming them to fairer opportunities. We have entrusted 
religion to the religious sentiments of human nature, without 
the interference or support of the State, and the free contribu- 
tions of men surpass the tribute of regal splendors. 

We have laid the foundation of a system of education for all 
in making the public school free, and in making it secular. Its> 
benefits are only beginning to be felt, but the mind of the 
country is awake, and we may expect the best results of a system 
that lias an ideal excellence beyond any present practice. We 
live in obedience to order and law, without violence; and good 
feeling and good manners shed their invisible, mighty protection 
over all. American society has never required a standing army 
to enforce order upon the people. We feel that the Government 
is steady, because its b;ise is broad— reaching to the freedom and 
equal rights of every man— and that, in the long run, the laws 
which the people make themselves they will respect. 

Governor! please accept my respectful salutations and the 
salutations of the people! The occasion is worthy the presence 
of the first citizen of the Commonwealth. One hundred years 



12 



s(j 



ago the foundations of this city were laid by the ancient mon- 
archy of Spain. It was reserved for another age and another 
race to carry forward the civilization which you now witness, and 
which you have the honor to represent. If the principles which 
I have rehearsed are true; if the attainments that have been 
made under them are a just expression of their wisdom and 
power, we may take pride and gratitude in our citizenship, and 
renew our vow to the freedom and equality of men. Let mighty 
salvos pioclaiin it ! Let banners wave in proud homage and tri- 
umphant joy! Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof ! Let 
us bid the future generations hail ! Hail ye happy races yet un- 
born that shall receive such an inheritance ! Let the people lift 
up their voice: Yea, let the people lift up their voice: Te Deum 
Laudamus. 



I i 



